Incorrect. I see nothing in John 17 which I disagree with.
As usual it is YOUR interpretation of things which I disagree with. Equating your interpretation with the text itself is the same as rewriting the Bible yourself. Apparently you think you can do a better job than God Himself.
And for Ephesians 2:1, it does not say the same as what you said. I can say my class came alive when I talked about something. It doesn’t mean they were raised from the spiritually dead. Though in this case I am not claiming you are wrong. It seems a reasonable interpretation. But that doesn’t make it reality. That is overstating things. It is what you like to say and it is not what the text says.
… you are wasting my time with this nonsense… I think I need to ignore you some more.
I like the orthodox way of looking at humans, as I have understood it. Many in western traditions feel that humans are totally corrupted, there is nothing good in humans before they get grace and are saved. The orthodox tradition has the understanding that the image of God in humans has been distorted but there is something good left. Not enough to save anybody but even non-believers have the ability to do good acts.
The western interpretation of humans being totally corrupt, unable to do good, seems to be blind to the fact that many non-believers sometimes do good acts. These acts do not save anybody but it would be one-sided to ignore the good deeds made by ‘wrong’ persons.
Through common grace and general providence the ungodly are certainly not as bad as they could be – it would be silly to say they were. ‘Totally corrupted’ is an overstatement leaving the impression that they are. What it should be saying is that there is no part of us is not tainted by sin.
I can agree with ‘tainted by rebellion against God (sin)’. Even dictators can sometimes do good deeds although they have lifted themselves to the seat of absolute dominion that belongs to God. To be an extremist, I could even say that every person singing ‘I did it my way’ is trying to steal the dominion from the Lord. This is just an observation, not a judgement.
How do you know? On what authority do you make that statement (since you’re so big on telling people what they may or may not say, declaring they don’t have the right, especially me ; - ).
I’d be interested in your showing examples where what I said might not be true.
FYI I interpret such passages according to the classic Arminian view of corporate predestination, as opposed to the Calvinist interpretation of individual predestination. This means that passages such as John 17 are merely referring to the fact that a group of people will choose to follow Jesus and another group will not, and that God the father grants Jesus authority over his church (but he does not individually pre-determine which people will comprise his church).
I was helped by this explanation from Greg Boyd’s blog site called “Re-thinking predestination”.
One night the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision: “Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent. For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city.” So Paul stayed in Corinth for a year and a half, teaching them the word of God. Acts 18:9-11
‘Have’ is present tense, it’s a done deal and not the future tense ‘I will have. It also says ‘I have many people’ – that should be understood as ‘many individuals’, not an amorphous group.
Why? Because we are also told in multiple places that there is a Book of Life, and that it’s not a work in progress. He knows my name and yours, and they will not get lost.
Yes, well, there are some of us who are comfortable with the idea that when God interacts with humans, he can do so in a time-bound way, and find that it logically makes the most sense that he does so, as a relational being.
And I don’t see how the point of God “having” people in the present tense in Acts contradicts in any way the Arminian (corporate election) view expressed in Boyd’s commentary. How does it?
And how do you know that the “Book of Life” is currently completely written and finalized? Seems to go beyond what scripture actually tells us about that book.
Why couldn’t God acting in “real time” chose to intervene in the lives of his children in the present, based on his exhaustive knowledge of the present? Seems to me that God’s actions in the world don’t require him to be “timeless”.
That overlooks the vast number of precursor events for his providences ‘in the present’ to fall out in their timing and placing as they do. They are implicitly in the past, from our perspective. And when there are whole series of events connected only by their meaning, the number of orchestrated precursors required increases by orders of magnitude.
Can a timeless God act in the world? The purpose of this paper is to address this question by exploring the nature of timeless God’s omniscience. In the first part I argue—having explored what it means to say that God is timeless—that we should think of a timeless God’s omniscience factually rather than propositionally i.e. that a timeless God doesn’t know all propositions, but does know all facts. One consequence of this view is that though everything (what we call past, present and future) is equally present in the mind of a timeless God, being timeless he doesn’t know which events are past, which are present and which are future. For example, he doesn’t know that what is presently happening in the world is presently happening. The central issue I then consider in the second part is whether his knowledge could really be of the right kind for him to act in the temporal world. I argue that though God has knowledge of all the events in the temporal world and even knows (perhaps) their temporal orderings, he is unable to intervene because to do so he would need to have the knowledge he lacks; namely, he would need to know which events in the temporal world are past, which are present and which are future.
